Hi Dan, since you are re-working most of the D-Bus APIs based around Network Manager, I like to propose a radical change on how you handle the UI part. Personally I think that the current UI inside Network Manager (even with 0.7) has too much tasks to fulfill. I prefer having a "stupid" UI.
So my main concern is that replacing the current UI is too complicated. One reason is that you need a well known bus name for the UI on the system bus. This makes it impossible to install two UI components or split tasks between two applications. We did the same in the early days of BlueZ and I think it is not a good design to hard- code a well known bus name into the daemon and have the UI use the same one. So for BlueZ we came up with the D-Bus agent concept. So let me try to explain it. So the UI only gets a unique name (no need for a D-Bus security file). Then it registers itself a object path (the actual path value is unimportant). After that it calls a RegisterAgent(object path) method inside the daemon. Now the daemon knows where to find an agent (object path and the unique name from the message sender value) and can call into this object for additional information. It really serves as a callback interface and the only things to agree on is the interface description. The bus name and object path are kept random. This concept allows an easy way of monitoring agents. So you know the case when you have no agent (meaning no UI is running) or when an agent dies. No unneeded D-Bus calls that might fails etc. The other advantage is that in theory you can stack agents and call them in order. This is useful if you have a wizard or some small cases where the UI should look different from the general case. Or unregister and then re-register agents. For example for multi user scenarios. Regards Marcel _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
